More of Henry Blodget's book in Slate - He Calls Jim Cramer 'that Crazy Man'

I wrote a post about the first two parts of Henry Blodget's book excerpts at Slate. The third is up, and in it he devotes quite a few words to Jim Cramer and his show on CNBC, Mad Money. His stats on Cramer's stock picks are more current than I have previously encountered, and it's not pretty. A few thoughts first.

When Kudlow and Cramer was on CNBC I thought it was the best thing going. Those two counterbalanced each other nicely. I guess you could say that with their show the total was more than the sum of the parts. It's gone but not forgotten. I would say that Jim is jumping the proverbial shark nightly for CNBC, and they have not had much success otherwise with their evening programming. Now don't anyone tell him I said that, or he really will jump a shark on the show, and that could be the end.

A fellow I met some time ago would short Cramer's stock picks right as he made them in after-hours trading. He was not down on Cramer at all, but he believed that people were buying Cramer's picks willy-nilly as he made them without doing any personal research, and his thesis was that many of Cramer's picks went up, down, and then back up again. Thus the short sales. I have read Cramer's book Confessions of a Street Addict and really enjoyed it and learned a little bit about the mindset of a trader, that trading as they do it seems to be mostly about outgaming the other traders, not even remotely about investing, as Ben Graham defined it, or about fundamental or technical analysis. It was, in a word, surreal, and just not rational. One thing I will say about Jim Cramer is that he can really write. I think I would like him if I knew him personally, but that we would agree on very little.



Why you should never take Jim Cramer seriously. - By Henry Blodget - Slate Magazine